Donna Leon’s detective Guido Brunetti is as keen on home-cooked meals as on solving cases. She talks about crime and the art of Italian cooking

T
he way readers obsess about her hero’s diet is still a source of amazement to
Donna Leon. Since the first of her 21 Venice-based crime thrillers appeared
20 years ago, police commissioner Guido Brunetti has gone about his business
in the city, solving bizarre murders, ­skirmishing with corrupt politicians
and regularly courting the wrath of the city’s shadowy and immensely
powerful establishment. But because he goes home for lunch, cooked by his
wife Paola, readers persist in seeing him as a foodie.

Not all readers, though. This view, Leon says, is “culturally specific”. Her
fans are exercised by Brunetti’s gustatory habits “in direct proportion to
how bad the food is where they come from”. So it’s Brits and Americans, as
if you hadn’t guessed, in the ranks of the foodie brigade. “The Spanish and
Portuguese never ask about the food,” she says, because their traditional
relationship to their national or